The Exiled (25 page)

THE SZABADKA PRISON
was situated in the centre of the town, at the end of a busy pedestrian street next to the train station. A school of some description seemed to be operating out of the part of the prison facing the street. Réka recalled that only a while ago there had been a bank in that spot. Anna was amused at the thought of a bank and prison sharing the same building.

An announcement crackled over the station’s loudspeakers: the intercity train from Belgrade would shortly be arriving at platform three. The prisoners must hear the announcements too. Anna looked at the bars across the windows and the heavy iron door that she would soon step through. Réka said she would wait in a nearby café.

Anna took the steep steps up to the door and pressed the buzzer. An intercom buzzed and a voice asked who was there and what business they were on. Anna replied, the voice asked her to wait a moment, and, before long, the iron door began to swing open like the entrance to Ali Baba’s cave. Two guards, a man and a woman, stood waiting in the small, brightly lit entrance hall. Anna showed them the warrant signed by the judge, her identification card and her police badge. The female officer asked Anna to empty her pockets and walk through a metal detector. After that she gave Anna’s body a thorough scan with a small monitor and frisked her by hand through her clothes. The male guard spoke into a walkie-talkie and Anna heard that she had been granted permission to enter the prison.

First, the guards escorted Anna to the office of the prison governor. The room featured a large bookcase, three filing cabinets and a desk with neat piles of papers placed between a computer and a
penholder. The governor looked through Anna’s paperwork, asked a few questions in English – not Serbian or Hungarian, she noticed – and informed the guards that Anna and the prisoner could be taken to the interview room.

Farkas Lajos stared past Anna into the distance. He seemed frozen. He was skinny and pale, his face was gaunt and his eyes didn’t betray the slightest flicker of emotion. Anna felt as though she was looking into the eyes of a dead man. She’d planned all her questions in advance, but suddenly she seemed unable to say anything. The man looked like the living dead. How do you talk to someone like that?

‘What?’ the man asked abruptly and stared at Anna with his black, lifeless eyes as though he saw nothing at all. As though he didn’t want to see anything; as though he couldn’t bear it if he did.

‘My name is Fekete Anna. I’m the daughter of Fekete István. Do you remember him?’

‘Remember? What’s that? Things like memories lose their meaning in here. Think about it too much and you’ll go mad.’

‘How long have you been in here?’

‘A long time. Ever since your father died. Almost.’

‘Why? What did you do?’

‘They said I robbed three banks and assaulted a guard.’

‘Did you rob the banks?’

The man suddenly gave a hollow, harrowing laugh. ‘What does it matter? Here I am and I’m going to stay here for a long time yet.’

‘But you remember my father, is that right?’

‘Never met him.’

‘But you testified that Lakatos didn’t shoot him.’

‘We weren’t asked to testify to anything.’

‘What happened that night?’

‘And why the fuck should I tell you that? Anyway, I can’t remember.’

‘I … I have to know what happened.’

‘Knowing things, remembering things, it’s all meaningless when you’re cooped up in a padded cell a few metres across without seeing anyone for forty years.’

‘I don’t live in a place like that.’

‘You know, there’s nothing in my cell. Nothing at all. No table, no chair, not even a bed. There’s a hole in the floor to shit in. Nothing else.’

‘Do you sleep on the floor?’

‘They bring me a mattress at night and take it away in the morning.’

‘Surely they let you into the yard sometimes?’

‘One hour a day. By myself.’

‘Do you have anything to read? A radio? A television?’

The man looked at Anna as though she was stupid.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘What do you do all day?’

‘Nothing.’

‘How do…? How can you cope?’

‘You can’t. A death sentence would have been better than this. But they wanted to be like a modern European country, so they got rid of the death penalty, because it’s supposed to be barbaric. Now they give us life sentences in these fucking padded cells, alone for forty years. That’s the worst of it, to be alone the whole time. Alone with your own thoughts. Though they soon disappear too.’

‘What happened that evening?’

‘What evening?’

‘The evening when you and Lakatos were together and my father was shot somewhere else.’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘I want to hear your version.’

‘And what are you going to do with it? Do you think you can help me?’

‘To be honest I’m more interested in helping myself. And a little girl who has disappeared. Her surname is Lakatos too.’

Something flickered in Farkas Lajos’s eyes.

So you’re not completely emotionless after all, thought Anna.

‘How come they let you in here?’ he asked. ‘They don’t let just anybody come in.’

‘I work for the police in Finland, so they granted me special permission.’

‘Ah, a fucking cop.’

‘That’s right.’

‘A foreign cop. They like kissing the foreign cops’ arses. Do you want to know what they do to me in here?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘They decide I’ve been behaving badly. So they tie me by my hands and feet to a metal ring on the floor, inside the padding. And there I sit until they decide I can behave myself properly.’

‘How long do you sit like that?’

‘Days, weeks, months, who’s counting? What’s the date today?’

Anna told him the date and he began to laugh. He rubbed the thin grey hair on his head and rocked back and forth.

There was a knock at the door and the guard looked inside.

‘Ten minutes,’ he said and disappeared again.

‘We were sitting at my place playing cards that night and drinking a bottle of hooch. Me, Lakatos and Bakró. We didn’t leave the house all evening. Then the next morning the cops turned up and took Lakatos away. Nobody listened to me and Bakró. They said we were so drunk we couldn’t have remembered whether Lakatos had slipped out or not. But it wasn’t true. We weren’t that drunk. Then they found the gun in Lakatos’s yard. In the trash. And it turned out it was the same gun that was used to shoot Fekete.’

‘Where did you live back then?’

‘In Velebit.’

‘Quite close to the farmhouse where it happened?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Was there a car?’

‘Where?’

‘Did you have one, or did Lakatos? Was there a car in the yard?’

‘None of us had a car. Lakatos had a horse.’

‘Where did he live at the time?’

‘In Velebit too. Almost next door.’

‘A neighbour who lived near the farmhouse remembers seeing two sets of headlights passing by that evening.’

‘It was the murderer, for sure, heading for the farm. When they found the gun, that was the end of it. They took Lakatos away and we hardly saw him after that. Me and Bakró tried talking to the police, said we’d testify, but they wouldn’t listen to us.’

‘Have you any idea who the real killer might have been?’

‘No, but it couldn’t have been just anyone. You don’t put an innocent man away for nothing. Not even a gypsy.’

‘Was there any talk about it at the time? Rumours about a miscarriage of justice? Someone must have suspected something.’

‘Folk said all kinds of things – that somebody was paid a large sum of money, that it was mafia cash, a bribe or something like that. The guy that shot your father became a rich man.’

‘Did you know that Bakró has died?’

The man grimaced, revealing his rotten teeth. ‘I didn’t know, but it’s not surprising. Says a lot, doesn’t it? Lakatos and Bakró are dead and I’m going to spend the rest of my life rotting away in here.’

‘Time’s up,’ the guard shouted from the door and Anna stood up. She thanked the man and felt a great sorrow that she couldn’t reach out her hand and touch him.

The guards led Farkas Lajos out of the room, then fetched Anna and escorted her out of the building.

The iron door slammed shut behind her.

The sun was shining. Anna lit a cigarette and didn’t know what to do.

THE ATTIC IN ANNA’S
childhood home wasn’t the typical frightening, airless space covered in cobwebs. Small windows at the start of the roof let daylight flow inside and fluorescent lamps lit up every last corner. Boxes of old possessions were neatly stacked, some in shelving units, some in orderly rows on the floor. Her mother had always been good at this – maintaining order and taming chaos – but the fact that such organisation continued unhindered into the attic space never ceased to astonish Anna.

Anna was different – she usually grabbed clothes from the line and threw them into the wardrobe without much thought for orderliness. But neither did she have excess stuff packed and hidden away at the back of her cupboards or in her basement storage space. If she had something she didn’t need, she gave it away – though that happened rarely, as she had never been one to acquire things for the sake of it and didn’t enjoy shopping. So the amount of stuff hoarded in her mother’s attic took Anna by surprise. Why keep all this? Why had these things been acquired in the first place?

Now, however, she was grateful for her mother’s sense of organisation and for the fact that each box was carefully labelled. She wanted to stop at the box marked BOYS’ TOYS and see what her brothers had played with when they were children, but decided to leave it for a later date. She was sure that Áron’s miniature cars and teddy bears would have derailed her search and set off a wave of nostalgia, which right now she didn’t have time for. Instead she was thrilled to find her father’s old microscope – she might yet have use for that.

She easily located her father’s papers, but there were lots of them and they weren’t in as systematic an order as the rest of the attic. It took Anna almost an hour to find the right year – 1988, her father’s last. Sweat trickled down her back as she put the handwritten notebooks in order; the attic had stored the heat of the previous weeks
and the hot air was thick and almost tangible. She gathered the pile of papers under her arm and went downstairs into her room.

As Anna already knew, her father had been involved in an extensive investigation into the operations of the local mafia. She had read through all the old reports in the police case file and wanted to compare them to her father’s private notes. Something in the reports had bothered her, something that didn’t tally with what she had seen and heard, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. She hoped to find the answer in her father’s papers.

Most of the mafia’s criminal activity was concentrated in Belgrade and Prishtina, but its arms had reached into northern Yugoslavia too, as far as Szabadka, Kanizsa and other towns along the border. The investigation was not only about fraudulent building contracts but also involved smuggling. Drugs and even people and guns were being illegally transported across the border into Western Europe. Nothing new there, thought Anna. Whatever the cargo, it went by the same routes, the same methods, and more than likely involved some of the same people: there were bribes, kickbacks, embezzlement and deceit; corruption in the highest echelons of politics, the police force and the customs service.

Her father’s notes were scanty and not very detailed. He never mentioned any names. These notebooks must have served as a way of helping him work through his thoughts, Anna pondered. These were private comments that were never intended to form part of any official documentation. Anna thought she remembered the way her father would retreat out to the patio with a beer and a cigarette to think over the day’s events and write down things that came to mind in his notebooks. A criminal investigator even in his spare time. Like father like daughter.

One annotation caught Anna’s attention:
I think someone is deliberately hindering the investigation,
wrote her father in October 1988.
Someone is leaking information, perhaps working directly for the criminals. Find out who it might be.

Then, a few pages later, an entry for the following month:
How
can someone do this job without getting their hands dirty, if a good friend turns out to be a rotten apple? Where should our loyalties lie? With the state, the party, the cause or the person? Should we remain loyal to our friends? What should I do now?

Why had he gone to the farmhouse by himself? If he was expecting to run into the entirety of the Yugoslavian mafia, surely no policeman would be so reckless, so downright crazy as to walk right into the lion’s den by himself.

That was unless he thought he was going to meet a friend – someone he could trust after all. Had her father gone there to try and talk to this friend, to convince him to leave the criminal activity behind and get back on the straight and narrow? Her father must have known who or what he was expecting to encounter at the farmhouse. He must have deemed the situation safe, otherwise he wouldn’t have gone.

Who would he have trusted so unquestioningly?

At the end of the notebook were eleven empty pages. Anna flicked through them carefully, hoping against hope that some kind of mysterious, invisible code might appear and reveal what her father might have written had he returned from the farm that night.

On the final page there was a name. Underlined.

Remete Mihály.